Nonesup,
I can fully understand your skepticism.
What makes us confident on the Taiko Software Team, is the most difficult and challenging part is getting the software to sound really good. We know how to do that as evidenced by the SQ feedback we got from TAS users and now XDMS Alpha Users
We had no control of the UI in TAS, but XDMS is all ours and we can have it do and behave anyway we think will be appreciated by our User Group. It's not rocket science, but it takes effort, time and testing.
The Alpha User group has proved to be invaluable, finding bugs, making feature requests.
Software development has to be focused , compartmentalized and prioritized so that the Devs don't get overwhelmed. Happy Dev's write good code. They like writing code for the best sounding software, and one of the best looking software out there.